Commissioner’s Notes

Another week down and we’re now nearing the halfway mark. College football had some close wins across the board and some… not-so-close wins. FSU’s coaching search needs to be in full gear at the start of business on Monday. Georgia should be the unanimous #1, Florida sucks, and Indiana is a bitter disappointment, but not as much as Virginia Tech, Texas, LSU, or any of the many teams that could’ve flipped this week for me.

This week, we had the second-closest week in the PVPs, with the White pod stealing two wins by a combined 23 points. Dylan separated himself from the pack by all three metrics, but Bob and I aren’t totally out of reach. There are 13 weeks in the season, so next week, at the midpoint, I’ll do a more comprehensive review of where we fit in the standings. For this week, we’ll look into the spreads.

Games of the week

• Tuesday – FIU @ Jacksonville State. These teams were the winners of two top C-USA matchups this past Wednesday, so this is another big matchup with CCG implications. FIU still has Liberty and Kennesaw State later in the season, so they probably need this one much more than Jacksonville State does.
• Wednesday – either? None of these are great teams. These 4 teams have a combined win total of 5, so somebody has to win, but the more closely matched game by FPI and spread is Western Kentucky @ Sam Houston.
• Thursday – again, some pretty lopsided games. Go do a hobby and skip these. If you have to pick one, maybe go with Colorado State @ Texas State. These seem like ever-so-slightly better teams.
• Friday – App State @ Coastal Carolina. These are two teams that have struggled a bit but are pretty close.
• Saturday Noon – Ohio State @ Indiana. I’m not the highest on Indiana, but they’re still good and I expect this to be a good game.
• Saturday Afternoon – Third Saturday in October, with an honorable mention to Missouri @ Ole Miss. TSIO could get out of hand if the Tennessee offense does not make massive improvements over the next 6 days.
• Saturday Primetime – Notre Dame @ BYU, the Battle of the Religious Avatars. BYU looks like a paper tiger to me, but they’re by far ND’s biggest test so far.
• Saturday Late Night – none again; these are all expected blowouts. Go to bed.

PVP Matchups

• #1 Dylan (5-1) vs #2 Zach (4-2)
• #3 Bob (3-3) vs #6 Jacob (1-5)
• #4 Bruce (3-3) vs #5 Dan (2-4)

Looking at the spreads

As you may have noticed from watching the scoreboards over the weeks, the projected outcomes very often do not match up with what happens. This game is often won or lost on a team here or there that’s a 3-point favorite losing by 3 touchdowns or winning by 30. This week, I looked at our various performances vs the spread and looked for places where a few really bad games or weeks ruined somebody.

Here we see the outcome of every game we played, showing predicted margin (i.e., inverse spread) vs actual margin. Most games really do line up right along the expected line, but there are some clear outliers.

There are few, if any, really good conclusions you can draw from that; it’s mostly noise, but you can find patterns if you look long enough. One thing I notice is that I’m slightly overrepresented in the right-of-the-line games with high spreads (i.e., favorites doing even better than expected) as well as the left-of-the-line games with low spreads (i.e., toss-ups where the slight favorite got blown out). This likely explains why it always feels like I’m losing in the most frustrating games but am still high in the standings.

On a weekly basis, everybody has had a week where the odds gods have been out to get them. Jacob and Bruce are the worst off in this regard, which explains why they’re trailing. Dylan’s best weeks and most of his net positive spreads are from the last two weeks, which likewise explains his surge. Below is everyone’s week-by-week and cumulative performance vs the spread.

In PVP matchups, against-the-spread results have shifted several matchups, especially recently. There have been 20 total games that could have shifted the PVP wins, including 9 this week. This week’s games are listed in the table below; 5 games each had bigger ATS differences than the total margin between Bruce and Jacob, and 4 between Bob and me.

Finally, we’ll take a quick glance at the biggest offenders for beating and missing the spread.

The top teams vs the spread average 9.3-19.4 points per game better than the spread. Unsurprisingly, Dylan is the most represented here with 5 of them. Jacob and Bruce have only 2 and 1, respectively.

In the bottom teams, these losers are missing expectations by 5.3-13.0 points per game. Again, no surprise who has these: Bruce and Jacob lead, Dylan and Dan trail. Coincidentally, both Bob and I are well represented in both.

And lastly, one interesting aspect to look at is teams that are missing in either direction. These are landmines. It doesn’t help much if a team is a 10-point underdog and wins by 10 and then the next week is a 10-point favorite and loses by 10. You need some degree of consistency and reliability to even be able to confidently pick them on a weekly basis. The top 10 hot and cold teams are listed below by the sum of their absolute divergence from the spread. These are the teams that will burn you one week and save you the next.

Commissioner’s Notes

Intro

We’re through week 5, into the heart of the season. For the most part, teams are into the core of conference play and we’re getting fewer FCS or G6/P4 buy games, so we expect to see points become much lower but probably slightly more predictable.

In our game, we’ve now completed one full turn of the PVP matchups, so we’ll look into those in a little more detail. If the season ended today, the playoff matches (starting week 11) would be:

• Wildcard Round:
  • #2 Dylan v #6 Jacob
  • #4 Dan v #5 Bruce
• Round 1:
  • #1 Zach v Dan/Bruce winner
  • #3 (pod winner) Bob v Dylan/Jacob winner

There’s still a lot to go so things will almost certainly change, since right now tiebreakers dominate everything.

Choke Job of the Week

I didn’t watch a ton of games outside of Tennessee this week, so I didn’t see anything crazy. I will have to go with Florida mainly because I picked them, and that -28 hurt when I only missed 1st on the week by 30 points. I think we can all agree it’s a good day when Florida gets blown out. With the chain of Ole Miss getting overrated for beating LSU and Florida getting overrated for beating Ole Miss, I fully expect to see Mizzou as the consensus #1 when this week’s polls come out.

Week 6 Preview

I’ll jump ahead to the week 6 preview before getting into the PVP discussion. Next week’s matchups are:

• Bob v Zach
• Bruce v Jacob
• Dan v Dylan

Games of the week

• Tuesday: for the first week of the season we’ve got a Tuesday matchup, but not MACtion so it doesn’t really count. Only one option, but it’s not great: Southern Miss @ Troy.
• Wednesday: both of these are close; by FPI it’s a slight edge to Jacksonville State (#2 C-USA) at Kennesaw State (#3) but the other matchup is #4 (NMSU) vs #5 (FIU). Both games feature a 1-0 in conference team against one that hasn’t played a conference game, so both winners will be in a much better position for trying to make the CCG than the losers.
• Thursday: UTSA-South Florida. Based on FPI, both teams, along with North Texas, are projected in a dead heat for #2 with 8.2-8.5 wins each.
• Friday: FSU @ Louisville. Coming off a thrashing of Virginia, does Norvell actually still want his job? Maybe!
• Saturday Noon: probably Tulane @ Army, as it’s the closest matchup; the opening spread for Texas A&M at Missouri only has Mizzou as 3-point favorites but I find that really hard to justify with Texas A&M’s wins being Missouri State, Arizona State, and Arkansas (all home) and their losses being double-digits at home to Kentucky and a beatdown at LSU.
• Saturday Afternoon: Houston at K-State; honorable mention to the Red River Rivalry since crazy stuff often happens in that one, despite Texas being a pretty comfortable favorite.
• Saturday Primetime: Georgia at Alabama. Much as it sickens me, this is going to be the marquee matchup pretty much any time it’s played.
• Saturday Late: all these are terrible, so I’ll go full sicko and pick Hawaii at Arizona State because it’s the latest. If you’re watching any of these, you don’t care about healthy sleeping habits.

PVP

At the end of 1 round of player matchups, Dylan and I are in the lead at 4-1 with the first tiebreaker (head-to-head) going to me. The entire White pod is tied at 2-3, and Jacob unluckily follows at 1-4.

Luck

The trend through the first 3 weeks has continued, with Bob and Jacob being the only players with net negative luck, but Jacob’s bad luck has slightly washed out and Bob’s has gotten worse.

Bob currently has the highest expected wins, and yet is only 2-3. There is no arrangement of PVP scheduling that would have him winning fewer than 2 weeks (by definition, since he won the overall twice). I must stress that the PVP order was generated entirely randomly. If I had the skills to plan something that devious, I would have used them to simply make myself better.

Wrong opponent, wrong time

This is, basically, a different version of the luck graph but I wanted to change the measurement of luck. The graph below measures the average scores of opponents in the week you played them vs their season average. As you might expect, Jacob and Bob are the worst in this regard, with their opponents scoring 40.1 and 36.3 points more in the weeks they play them than overall.

Side note – despite Jacob having the worst luck and me having the best luck by this metric, his only win and my only loss are in our matchup, so it could have been even worse (for him, or better for me).

Noteworthy Matchups

There have only been a few truly close matchups, but they’re spread out. The closest by far was Dylan over Bob in Week 3, by 8 points. At that point there were still some really big blowouts so it’s a near certainty that somewhere, in some game, a team scored (or failed to score) a garbage-time touchdown and field goal in a 50-point blowout that cost Bob the win (which isn’t even the “luck” I refer to in the section above, so Bob is possibly cursed). But before you feel too sorry for Bob, he’s also on the winning end of the biggest blowout yet, a 347-135 win over Bruce this week.

In total PVP matchups, Dylan and I are roughly equal at +389 and +351, respectively, with Bob and Dan still positive but lower at +74 and +21, and Jacob and Bruce net negative at -408 and -427. Those numbers might seem a lot bigger than they are, but we’re really not getting a lot of good week vs good week matchups; most everybody is winning big and losing big, with the average margin of victory at 94 points.

Close calls

Finally, I want to look at some close calls. There have been 4 instances where a PVP matchup loser could have flipped a single game and turned that week’s loss into a win. You can see those 4 in the table below. Obviously hindsight is 20/20 and I didn’t look at the winners to see if they could have flipped games to be uncatchable, but these 4 sting.